Fear Files Music
Marcelo Chaplin
How does one actually make an MIDI file work, as in, what determines the octave and the length of each note? How does the notation form a note correctly? My main software to work with this is Starbound Composer, a MIDI file renderer for the Chucklefish game Starbound.
You seem to be confused about what MIDI is. I'm not sure where you got that, but the above clip is emphatically not MIDI. MIDI is a binary format, and as such, is not really human readable. Here, for example, is the opening of Bach's Prelude No. 1 in C Major from the Well-Tempered Clavier, as viewed in a binary editor. Or at least one MIDI realization of it:
One typically uses another program to export a MIDI file. These often take the form of a musical notation program, such as Musescore, Lilypond, Finale, or Sibelieus; or the piano-roll editor of a more fully-featured DAW, such as Reaper, Sonar, Logic, or Garageband.
MIDI was first-and-foremost designed as a specification for controlling hardware. As such, it consists of a series of digital commands called MIDI Messages that are sent over a cable in real time. These messages typically represent performance data (such as depressing and releasing keys or pedals, twisting knobs, adjusting sliders, or varying breath pressure), and are used control a musical synthesizer -- either a hardware synth or a software synth (though other equipment such as stage lighting can be controlled as well). How the synthesizer reacts to these messages to produce sound, or other effects, is up to each individual synth implementation to determine. Some messages are also tagged with a number called a "channel" from 0-15, which I'm not going to discuss further.
MIDI files are a way of storing these messages. Each MIDI message is preceded by a corresponding time stamp, and this pair forms a MIDI Event -- a specific message at a specific time. The timestamp is actually provided as a delta-time; it gives the number of abstract units called ticks from the previous event. Converting between ticks and real time or musical time (bar, beat) can be a bit of a convoluted practice... For convenience, events in a file can be grouped into sequences called tracks. A MIDI file will then contain a header section, and some number of tracks.
Because a musical note lasts for a certain duration, and is not a single point in time, there is not a single "note" event in MIDI. Instead, to "form a note correctly" requires two events -- Note On, and Note Off -- representing the start and end of the note. These messages each have a note number, listed in the table that Felice provided, representing their pitch including octave. The duration of the note is just all the time that happens between these two events. Since there can be any number of other events in between them, if you wanted the full duration, you'd have to add together all the delta-times of all the events after the note-on event until you find a corresponding note-off event (in the same track, with the same pitch number, and on the same channel...).
MIDI is a binary file, you can't read as a regular text file, you need a program to extract information from it. Basically a midi file is a sequence of commands, representing what each istrument must do at a certain time. The most common command is probably NoteOn/NoteOff, and that command takes the note and the velocity. Note and velocity are in a range 0-127, and if you want know how "real" note are mapped to these number, have a look here: look at the image ( from the site above) :
Regarding your dubt about how is written the note length, we can say it is not actually written, since the file format store events in time, the note length is a consequence of the two event note-on - note-off.
You are talking about Standard MIDI Files (SMF). If you actually want to learn to write the raw code, you can find all the technical specifications and documentation at the website of the MIDI Manufacturers Association:
MIDI was originally envisioned as a "real-time" serial data protocol. There is a MIDI command for "note on" for a particular pitch, and there is another command for the "note off" for that pitch, and you can write code to represent them. However, MIDI itself doesn't put any of that in the context of a tempo or a timeframe. That's where the Standard MIDI File specification comes in -- essentially it provides for MIDI events and commands to occur with timestamps for each command and event against a "grid" of a tempo at a certain resolution (think of it as a kind of "bit rate") expressed as "ppq" or "parts per quarter note" (see the documentation).
However, if you can read and write standard music notation (sheet music), you don't need to learn how to write MIDI commands and events as text code. It would be useful to learn how to use a music notation software program such as Finale, Sibelius or MuseScore. Create your score in standard music notation, and any of these programs will output a highly detailed Standard MIDI file which you can use either within the program itself, or exported to a DAW (digital audio workstation) for playback using high-quality virtual instruments, to create an audio rendering.
Another method, without resorting to written sheet music notation, is to use the MIDI sequencer portion of a DAW to program music in step-time entry. The MIDI sequencer can play back your step-time programming in real-time and run your MIDI data through virtual instruments to create an audio rendering. I've just run a lot of terminology past you; you will need to look up all these terms and learn how MIDI sequencing works.
If you really want to go even further with writing code, music notation in a computer app such as Finale, Sibelius or MuseScore can be output as MusicXML, which contains a lot of metadata pertinent not only to the musical notes but also to how they are displayed as music notation. The MusicXML specification and its development are open-source; at this writing, it is in the process of being transferred from the ownership of the MakeMusic corporation to the W3C.
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The safest bets for me would be mp3 for music files, mp4 for videos, jpg for images, docx for documents, xlsx for spreadsheets, and so on. I could list out all the file types, but it would take too long!
If you know who sent you the files, try asking them to see if they know what they were. Alternatively, if you renamed the file yourself, try looking at the version history of the file to see if the renaming is visible there.
I have the flying saucer on alot of files with extensitons. Some of them was when I switched from paperport to File Center. I believe I can just delete them. How do you delete multiple files at once instead of 1 at a time.
Like those ominous bars of music signaling the approaching shark in Jaws, some of the most recognizable film scores were designed to terrify us.
But how do our brains recognize that music is supposed to be scary? The answer lies in our animal instincts, says UCLA evolutionary biologist Daniel Blumstein, whose research is published in the latest issue of the journal Biology Letters.
Blumstein's study of human sound perception began in an unlikely place: a community of yellow-bellied marmots in Colorado. "The thing that struck me was that every once in a while when we catch a baby marmot, they scream," Blumstein said.
Nonlinear noises, used by young animals to grab the attention of their parents, seem to also evoke an emotional response in humans. "Clearly, people in Hollywood know this, but it's not as though they're going out and using biologically tested algorithms," Blumstein said.
So Blumstein and his colleagues set out to discover if there truly was a formula for fear involving nonlinear sound. He teamed up with film score composer Peter Kaye and communications professor Greg Bryant to create two groups of original music: a group of emotionally neutral scores and scores that incorporated nonlinear elements.
Subjects were asked to listen to a random mixture of the two groups and rate them based on emotional stimulation, and the type of emotion they evoked. The results of the study confirmed Blumstein's prediction. The musical pieces containing nonlinear elements elicited the highest level of emotional stimulation, as well as the most negative feeling.
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